YLS Negotiating Team Advances to Finals of Copenhagen Competition

Yale Law School has advanced to the final round of the 2010 Copenhagen Competition, an international negotiation competition for law students. Successful in the earlier written round, the YLS team of Chris Suarez ’11, Keerthika Subramanian ’11, Tienmu Ma ’12, and Yuan Ji ’11 will now compete in final oral negotiations to be held October 13-15 in Copenhagen, Denmark. The theme of this year’s competition is “Access to Medicine.”

Good luck! (L-R) Chris Suarez ’11, Keerthika Subramanian ’11, Yuan Ji ’11, and Tienmu Ma ’12

Each participating team of law students will represent a fictitious country with an economic and political profile similar to that of the region from which they come. Their goal is to create a draft treaty proposal aimed at providing safe, effective, and affordable medicines to all by properly regulating international trade in pharmaceuticals, particularly at the border. The proposal must seek to balance the intellectual property rights regimes of developed countries with the need for safe and affordable medicines in developing countries.

The seven other law schools teams participating in the finals are Australian National University, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, University of California at Berkeley, National University of Singapore, University of the West Indies, Haramaya University, and Gujarat National Law University.

The first edition of the Copenhagen Competition was launched in 2009 in the run-up to the COP15 conference; the topic was climate change. More information on the Copenhagen Competition can be found on the Copenhagen Competition 2010 website.